1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer peripheral technology, and more particularly, to a multiplexed computer peripheral device connection switching interface which is designed for use in conjunction with a clustering computer system equipped with a plurality of independent processing units, such as a blade server system equipped with a plurality of server modules, for the purpose of allowing the multiple server modules of the blade server system to share a common set of peripheral devices, such as a keyboard and a mouse, in a multiplexed manner.
2. Description of Related Art
Blade server is a clustering type of network server that is characterized by the use of a circuit board enclosure to integrate a cluster of server modules (commonly called “blades”), with all of these server modules providing the same server functionality. In other words, a blade server can respond to a client's request by linking any one of the clustered server modules to the client. In practical implementation, each server module is made into a single circuit board (i.e., blade), which can be easily fitted to the blade server's enclosure to increase the blade server's client serving capacity. Moreover, a blade server is typically equipped with a common management control module for controlling all the operations of the multiple server modules and their shared resources in the blade server.
A computer platform is typically equipped with a dedicated set of peripheral input devices, such as keyboard and mouse, which allow the user to input data and commands to the computer platform in the operations of applications or system management tasks. In network applications, blade servers are used as Web servers, file servers, E-mail servers, and so on. In such applications, since peripheral input devices are required only in the setup stage and are unnecessary during the server operation, keyboard and mouse are typically removed to save equipment cost and room space. For this sake, blade servers are typically unequipped with keyboard and mouse during actual operation, and the keyboard and the mouse are externally coupled to the blade server only when it is necessary to perform system management tasks on the blade server, such when one of the server modules suffers from system crash.
One solution to the foregoing need is to utilize a KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switch that allows a blade server to be externally connected to a keyboard, a video display unit, and a mouse. However, for the blade server systems currently utilized by IESC (Inventec Enterprise System Corporation), the keyboard and the mouse are coupled to a PS/2 peripheral connecting unit; and in practical application, in order to couple the PS/2 peripheral connecting unit to a KVM switch, it requires the use of a USB-to-PS2 converter. One problem in the use of USB-to-PS2 converter, however, is that it would have low compatibility and cross-platform capability that only allows it to be usable on some specific blade server platforms and incompatible with other operating systems such as the Solaris server operating system.